A Journal of the Last Voyage Perform'd by Monsr. de la Sale, to the Gulph of Mexico, to Find Out the Mouth of the Missisipi River

Source:

Joutel, Henri. A Journal of the Last Voyage Perform'd by Monsr. de la Sale, to the Gulph of Mexico, to Find Out the Mouth of the Missisipi River; Containing An Account of the Settlements He Endeavour'd to Make on the Coast of the Aforesaid Bay, His Unfortunate Death, and the Travels of His Companions for the Space of Eight Hundred Leagues across That Inland Country of America, Now Call'd Louisiana, (and Given by the King of France to M. Crozat,) till They Came into Canada. (London: Printed for A. Bell, B. Lintott, and F. Baker, 1714).

Pages/Illustrations:

121 / 0

Citable URL:

www.americanjourneys.org/aj-121/

Author Note

Little is known about the early life of Henri Joutel
(1640?-1735). He was probably born about 1640 in Rouen,
Normandy, where he was a neighbor of the Robert Cavelier, Sieur
de La Salle (see also
AJ-049, AJ-53, AJ-114, AJ-122, and AJ-124); his father was a gardener for the
explorer’s
family. He joined the French army as a young man and became La
Salle’s friend and confidant on the ill-fated Texas expedition
described in this document.

Expedition of 1684-1687

La Salle had long envisioned a chain of French forts and
trading posts that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Gulf
and channel the lucrative fur trade of the interior to France.
To establish the southern point on that semi-circle, he sailed
for the Gulf of Mexico with 180 colonists in four ships on July
24, 1684, to plant a settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi.
They overshot their intended destination, however, and were
shipwrecked on Matagordas Bay not far from present-day Houston,
Texas. Here the frustrated colonists built Fort St. Louis, from
which they reconnoitered much of Texas in a vain search for the
Mississippi until, on March 19, 1687, mutinous settlers ambushed
and killed La Salle (see AJ-114). Most of the remaining
colonists soon died from disease or were massacred by the local
Indians.

Joutel, however, escaped both assassination by La Salle’s
murderers and the massacre at Fort St. Louis. Instead, he led
six other survivors northeast through Texas and Arkansas until
they struck the Mississippi, which they then followed upstream
to the French settlements. They reached Illinois in September,
1687, where they spent the winter, and arrived at Quebec in July
and France in October, 1688, more than eighteen months after leaving
the doomed Texas colony. After his return home, Joutel nearly
disappears from the historical record. He was interviewed in
1722 by historian Pierre-François-Xavier Charlevoix (1682-1761)
and may have died as late as 1735.

Document Note

Joutel’s account was first published in Paris in 1713 without
his permission or input; we give here the English translation
published the following year. Unfortunately these contemporary
versions omit almost half of Joutel’s original manuscript
journal. The complete text first appeared in volume three of Pierre
Margry’s Découvertes et Etablissements des Français
dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale,
1614-1754 (Paris: D. Jouaust, 1876-1886) and was only
translated into English quite recently, as The La Salle
Expedition to Texas: the Journal of Henri Joutel, 1684-1687,
edited and with an introduction by William C. Foster (Austin:
Texas State Historical Association, 1998).

Other Internet and Reference Sources

This is one of several documents concerning the career of the
French explorer Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle (see also
AJ-049, AJ-53, AJ-114, AJ-122, and AJ-124). For another eyewitness
account of La Salle's murder, see especially AJ-114.

The National Library of Canada has created “Pathfinders and
Passageways: The Exploration of Canada” at
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/2/24/h24-220-e.html with a wealth of
background information, images, and excerpts from primary
sources on the country’s early history that will provide further
biographical and historical information. Other contemporary
primary documents can be found at the “Early Canadiana Online”
project,
www.canadiana.org